


The Overloaded Enterprise

by AuthorAuthor



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Bones regrets his life choices, Jim Kirk is a beautiful human being, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek crossed with Gerald Durrell, Sulu is delighted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 14:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5748310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorAuthor/pseuds/AuthorAuthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After they save the whales, Captain Kirk and the crew of the new starship Enterprise just... keep going back. </p>
<p>Conservation work is a hard habit to shake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Overloaded Enterprise

It was an acknowledged fact of human history that any seemingly insurmountable task, achieved once, becomes easier over time.

Look at that mountain on Earth, what was it – Everest. Look at climbing Mount Everest. How long had it taken for them to make it to the summit, and how many people had died doing it? And then by the end of the 22nd century they had a monorail installed, right to the very top.

The first time the Enterprise travelled to 20th century Earth, it required a black star and a slingshot manoeuvre around the sun.

The second time was easier.

The third time, they didn’t even have to stop to pick up any high-energy photons afterwards. Which was good, because there didn’t seem to be any around.

//

 

“A _what_?” asked Bones.

“A Stellar’s sea cow,” Kirk said, with his habitual earnestness. “One of the largest Earth mammals to survive into modern times. It was hunted to extinction in the 18th century, and now it turns out that their saliva contains a unique biochemical marker that our scientists need to synthesize a, well, something, I’m a little hazy on the details, and besides…”

“Besides _what_?”

“Well, we’ve still got those tanks we used to transport the humpback whales. It seems a shame to only use them once, after you and Scotty and Sulu went to all that trouble.”

//

 

“I knew it. I knew this was going to happen, there are _consequences_ to letting a bunch of wild animals run around the ship like it’s a, what-do-you-call-it, some kind of medieval _zoo_.”

“It’s just a scratch, sir,” said the ensign.

“Sure it is,” Bones said, digging aggressively through a box of hypos. “That’s how it _starts_. And then next thing you know your leg swells up like a Hyperborian’s head at sea-level. And then it turns green. And _then_ it falls off.”

The ensign swallowed heavily. The crewmate who had accompanied him to the sickbay looked a little green himself.

“Doctor, I do not believe such speculation is helpful under the circumstances,” Spock said severely.

“It’s perfectly plausible! Who knows _what_ diseases that hairy little fiend is carrying?” He found the hypo he was looking for and held it up to the light to check the condition of its contents.

“It is most unlikely that the _Mesocricetus auratus_ , or Golden Hamster, is at all dangerous. After all, our records show that Earth children used to keep them as pets,” Spock pointed out. "I believe they got considerable physical and emotional benefits from the relationship."

“Hah! It’s a _rodent_ , and you know what else we got from rodents? Plague! The Black Death!”

The ensign whimpered. His crewmate tightened the grip he had on his arm to prevent him from sliding onto the floor in a faint.

“Actually, Doctor, I believe it was fleas that were the actual carriers of the bacilli -.”

“How did the buck-toothed maniac get him, anyways?” Bones demanded.

“It ran up his pant leg, sir” the crewmate explained as Bones stabbed his patient in the neck with the hypo.

“It ran up your pant leg,” he repeated, disgusted. “And _that’s_ why you always tuck your pants _into_ your boots! Idiot!”

//

 

The hot-house atmosphere of Recreation Room Two seemed even more oppressive than usual. As well as the leathery humidity and the sickly-sweet smells that wafted from the flowers, the room was filled with the reedy, repetitive calls of thousands and thousands of insects.

Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu appeared absolutely delighted by it all.

“Weren’t you offered a captaincy?” Bones demanded. “You could have your own ship! Your own crew!”

“But this is so much more _interesting_!” Sulu exclaimed.

The high-pitched hum was boring a hole through Bones’s temples. He pressed his hands against his ears, but it didn’t stop the noise. “Raising _bugs_?”

“We need _something_ to feed all our new passengers.” He held up the bowl he was eating from. “Chapatis?”

Bones edged his way cautiously into the recreation room. There didn’t appear to be any hamsters in sight. No striped carnivorous marsupials (and hadn’t _that_ been a fun trip to Earth) leapt out at him from under the overhanging leaves of the plants.

He relaxed fractionally and took a chapatis from the bowl. It was a sort of flatbread, cut into triangular sections, speckled with dark flecks throughout. “Whole-grain flour?”

“Something like that,” Sulu agreed as Bones took a bite.

Aside from plants, the room was crowded with enormous plastic tubs, the lids of which were covered with a fine mesh. He wandered over and peeked inside one. On top of a layer of crushed bran, hundreds of brown crickets scuttled under and over their grey cardboard shelters. One of them gathered its back legs underneath of it and leapt, bouncing off the mesh top and making Bones jump.

“Gives me the heebie-jeebies,” he muttered, wiping his hands off on his shirt. He looked skeptically at Sulu. “And _this_ is more interesting than flying a _spaceship_?”

“Oh, yes! Did you know, insects are four times as efficient at converting feed to meat as mammals are? And they produce fewer greenhouse gases in the process. Plus they have as much protein as beef, and many micronutrients including iron and zinc.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Bones wondered, taking another chapatis. They really were quite tasty. A bit more salt than he could honestly condone as a medical officer, but he was off-duty now. It was fine. He took another one.

“I like to read. And it’s all so fascinating!” He pushed the bowl of chapatis closer to Bones with an encouraging smile. “You know, entomophagy has been around for the entirety of human history. Incidence of it have been recorded throughout Earth history. There was even a real fad for it in the twenty-first century.”

“Huh.” Bones chewed thoughtfully. “Still sounds kind of off to me. I mean, you wouldn’t catch me eating…”

His voice trailed away as a niggling suspicion began to make itself felt. He stared, wild-eyed, from Sulu to the chapatis in his hand, and back at Sulu.

“No,” he said, horrified.

Sulu’s smile grew wider.

//

 

“ _What_ ,” Bones said.

Spock raised an eyebrow the barest micrometer. _Your statement is fragmentary and incomprehensible_ , the expression said. _Please elucidate_.

Bones had spent way too much time with this same ship full of idiots.

“What,” he repeated, “is –.” He waved his hand in the direction of Spock’s neck.

“It is a _Daubentonia madagascariensis_ , Doctor,” Spock said, as though it were obvious and Bones was a complete moron for having to ask – which was how he said pretty much everything, so at least _that_ was par for course. Bones had no good answer for why he hadn’t transferred the hell off this ship so much earlier. “A strepsirrhine primate from Madagascar that uses percussive foraging to -.”

“Why,” Bones interrupted, “are you _wearing_ it.”

The _Dau_ … the _Dauben_ … the whatever-the-hell-it-was turned its freakishly huge eyes on him. Its expression was one that you sometimes saw on the faces of cadets coming back on board after their first spacewalk, after they had realized for the first time how huge and incomprehensible the universe was, and how insignificant their lives were when set against the vast, nebula-speckled canvas of it. He wondered if the trip up from Earth had been too much for its tiny strepsirrhine brain. Or maybe _Dauben_ -whatsis looked like that _all the time_.

He couldn’t figure out which thought depressed him more.

Spock’s face relaxed into an expression of easy superiority. “Vulcan metabolisms run several degrees higher than those of humans,” he said, with a condescension that Bones deeply resented, as always. He was a doctor, dammit. He _knew_ that. “And as the _Daubentonia madagascariensis_ is native to a semi-tropical location, it is only logical -.”

Bones had stopped listening. The _Daubentonia madagascariensis_ had begun to move its hands, and he noticed for the first time that one of its fingers was – long. Really, _really_ long. It looked like a skinny, fur-covered twig, and the way it moved, _tap-tap_ ing along the curve of Spock’s jaw, reminded him of the antenna of some giant insect – which reminded him of the insects Sulu was raising, which made him remember that he was going to go back to his quarters to brush and brush his teeth and never stop.

“Why,” he said, interrupting Spock mid-flow, “is it _here_?”

He was aware that his voice had risen to a dangerously high pitch, and judging by the micro-expressions crossing Spock's face, he was aware of it too.

“I mean, what does it _do_? What is it even _for_?”

The whales had been well and good. He had _understood_ the whales. An alien transmission was going to evaporate the oceans and destroy a planet if they didn’t hear from some whales. Alright: so they had to go back in time and get some whales. That made _sense_ (sort of).

But now – now, there were lemurs cavorting around the cafeteria, and degus chewing holes in the Captain’s chair on the bridge, and Ensign Lewis had tripped over an agouti on his way to the observation deck and twisted his ankle, and now the ship’s Science Officer was wearing some kind of tiny primate like a twiggy, fur-covered scarf.

He just wanted to know where it was going to _end_.

Spock’s eyebrows drew together by a fraction of a millimeter. He made a motion with his hand as though to cover the _Daubentonia madagascariensis_ ’s ears.

“Your question would seem to contain a double-standard, Doctor,” he said. His voice was distinctly chilly. “After all, do we require every member of the races we assist to quantify their usefulness?”

The _Daubentonia madagascariensis_ gently inserted its freakishly elongated forefinger into Spock’s ear. Spock’s expression didn’t change.

Bones managed to make it all the way back to the medical bay before bursting into hysterical laughter, badly startling the eohippus that had been napping under one of the examination tables.

//

 

The island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, was warm and sunny. The air was rich with humidity and bracing organic scents. It was also where Bones took one look at the bird they were there to save and said:

“No.”

Kirk looked wounded, but Bones had seen that sad puppy-dog expression too many times before, usually in the context of discussions about the inadvisability of high-cholesterol meals, to be swayed.

“I don’t know what you mean, Bones.”

“It’s like someone took a Thanksgiving turkey and stuck a clown shoe on the front for a beak!” Bones exploded. “It’s _ridiculous_!”

“Actually, it’s apparently a kind of pigeon,” Kirk explained earnestly. “The Old Earth records call it a _dodo_.”

“Dook, dook,” said the dodo. It was enormously fat and had a ridiculous handful of white plumes stuck on its rear-end as a tail.

“Wonderful. That’s really wonderful, Jim. Do you _know_ what pigeons are, Jim? Rats with wings, _that’s_ what they are! Flying sinks of pestilence and disease! Read up in your Old Earth records on _that_!”

Kirk frowned. “That’s hurtful, Bones. Besides, this one can’t fly.”

The dodo twisted its head to one side so it could look at Bones around its freakishly large beak. Bones tried to convince himself that its expression wasn’t mildly reproachful.

“Great. It’s a bird that can’t even _fly_. What are you going to tell me this time, Jim? That it’s got some kind of, of magic dandruff? That it’s the only host to some rare kind of Old Earth louse? That its liver is the only known cure for Tellurian Space Fever?!”

“Bones!” Kirk looked shocked. “Of course we aren’t going to harvest its liver! How could you even _say_ such a thing?”

“Dook, dook,” said the dodo.

Bones crossed his arms over his chest. “Then what?” he challenged. “What does this overfed pigeon have that makes it so damn special that we have to cart it several million lightyears through space _and_ time to save it?”

He looked at Kirk. Kirk, mildly shame-faced, looked at him. The dodo turned its ridiculous head sideways to look at the ground, and pecked at a rock.

“Dook, dook.”

“Well, _look_ at it, Bones!” Kirk exclaimed, throwing out his hands. “We can’t just _leave_ it here!”

“Dook,” said the dodo.

Bones heaved a deep sigh and buried his face in his hands as Kirk stooped and picked up the bird, tucking it under his arm like a feathery football.

“Oh, and we’ll have to bring some of these trees back as well,” the captain added, waving a hand to indicate the many large, thick-trunked trees whose winding branches were entwined together in an impenetrable canopy over their heads. “Apparently they’re in a mutualistic relationship. I’m a little hazy on the specifics, but Sulu can fill you in on the details.”

“I can’t believe I ever agreed to fly anywhere with you bunch of soft-headed, bleeding-heart lunatics,” Bones said.

“Dook, dook,” said the dodo.

//

 

He should have known better.

Kirk had paged him while he was in the medical bay: a Code Red, on the ship’s lower deck, and Bones really should have known better, but he was a _doctor_ , dammit, if he was anything, and so he had grabbed his kit and sprinted for the turbolift, scattering hypos in his wake as he prayed, as he always did, that it wasn’t too serious, that he wasn’t too late –

\- and now he was staring over a waist-high partition at his – his – he refused to call it his _patient_ – and wondering if he had remembered to top up his medicinal bottle of Emergency Whiskey after the last Code Red, because _sweet mother of God_ , was he going to need it.

“What the _hell_ is that?”

“A rhinoceros,” Kirk sounded surprised, as though he hadn’t thought it was something that needed to be said. “A white rhinoceros. Bones, she’s not eating, and her stomach’s all swollen. I think she’s _sick_.”

“I thought they were mythological,” Bones said weakly. Besides, there was no possible universe in which that colour was _white_. He felt a momentary flare of terror at the thought that maybe Kirk had called him down here so he could give the hulking monstrosity a sponge bath.

The rhinoceros, backed into a corner of her pen, swung her head ponderously back and forth, looking at them first with one eye and then the other around the massive bulk of her horn.

“No, rhinoceroses are real. I think you’re maybe thinking of unicorns.”

“I assume we’re getting a pair of those next – no, what are you _doing_ ,” he added, as Kirk hoisted his leg up and clambered over the partition.

“How are you going to diagnose her if you don’t get a closer look? Come on! You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

“A _doctor_ , not a _veterinarian_ ,” Bones protested. “Damn it, Jim, it’s not safe – _godamnit_ ,” he added, as he found himself automatically following his captain over the partition and into the pen, because the habits of almost an entire lifetime were hard to shake.

His steps slowed as they got closer to the rhinoceros. She was _big_. Intimidatingly so. Huge muscles moved under her leathery, pebbled skin as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. An incongruously small black eye rolled this way and that in its socket as she watched them approach.

“Maybe it’s something about her diet,” Kirk said worriedly. “We’ve been synthesizing native vegetation, but maybe there's a nutrient or mineral or something she's not getting. It’s just so hard to tell – there’s so much information that’s missing, or been lost.”

He laid a gentle hand on the rhinoceros’ side, which expanded and then contracted as she expelled a breath.

“Don’t worry, girl,” he said confidently, in his best Captain’s voice. “You’ll be alright.”

The rhinoceros backed away slightly and snorted, swinging her head from one side to the other. She lifted her tail, relaxed some muscles and contracted others, and suddenly there were _two_ rhinoceroses, along with quite a lot of other stuff that really didn’t bear thinking closely about.

Bones suddenly felt seriously light-headed.

“Oh,” Kirk breathed. His expression was practically incandescent with joy. “ _Oh_. She wasn’t bloated, she was _pregnant_!”

To Bones, as he stood in the middle of the enclosure with rhinoceros afterbirth lapping about his ankles, that statement seemed _slightly redundant_.

The newborn rhino, its legs pedalling against the confines of the soft tissue sack that enveloped it, opened its mouth and _baaw_ -ed. The mother shuffled around to take a look, and began meditatively licking the afterbirth off of it.

Kirk, meanwhile, was looking anxious again. “Do you think they’re alright? Is that what’s _supposed_ to happen? What do you think, Bones? Bones?”

Bones stared at him. He opened his mouth. He closed his mouth. He opened his mouth again, and was horrified to hear himself utter the words:

“Dammit, Jim, I’m not a _rhinoceros gynecologist!_ ”

“What? Of course not,” Kirk said absently, not even turning around. “Can you even get a degree in that?”

Bones looked down at his hands. They were shaking. It was a very faint tremor, but still.

“Maybe there’s an apprenticeship program or something,” Kirk continued, “like they have for the engineers. _Look_ Bones, it’s _nursing_!”

And with that, something snapped. That was it. He was done, finished, fed up: with the stink of civet cat urine; the alfalfa pellets dispensed by the replicators in the canteen; the constant miasma of animal dander that triggered his allergies, which weren’t supposed to be a problem in the _sterile vacuum of space_. He drew in a deep breath, prepared to consign the lot of them to the worst hell his rural Georgia vocabulary was capable of describing – but then he caught the stupid, idiotic, _blissful_ look on Kirk’s face as he stood there, absorbed in the sight of the newborn rhinoceros nosing under its mother’s belly for a teat, its fly-whisk tail revolving wildly, and all the anger and frustration drained out of him all at once, like air from a punctured balloon.

Because, if Bones knew nothing else, he knew that, if there was one word that described Kirk’s character – one single word, that encapsulated the beginning and end of James Tiberius Kirk, Starship Captain – then that word was Love.

He loved his ship; he loved his crew; he loved the whole damned _universe_ and everything in it with a love so sincere, so all-encompassing that Bones was embarrassed for him. It had started with one five-year mission – ‘to boldly go’ – and now, years, _decades_ after, if humanity had become a byword across the known universe and beyond for honour, loyalty, justice and a particularly adventurous and egalitarian brand of pansexuality, then it was because of this man.

And it was for that reason that Bones had stuck with him for as long as he had.

Mustering all the sincerity of which his scraped and battered soul was capable, Bones laid a (slightly sticky) hand on his captain’s shoulder.

“You’re a good man, Jim,” he said, fighting hard to keep his voice from breaking, “and a wonderful captain. But if you don’t get out of my goddamn way so I can get into a decontamination shower in the next thirty seconds, _I will set fire to this ship and everything in it_.”

//

 

_Space. The final frontier._

_These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its –_

“Captain, there’s a message for you from Deck Five. It seems that the potoroo has escaped into the air ducts again.”

“I’ll tell Security to send a team down.”

_Its five-year mission –_

“Uh, watch where you step there, Bones.”

“Damn it! Chekov, get your – what the hell _is_ that, anyways?”

_It's five-year mission, to -_

“A tapir, sir!”

“Well, get it under control! I’m a doctor, damn it, not a, a _stablehand!_ ”

“Yes, sir!”

_… Well. Maybe five-years is a little optimistic._

//

 

FIN


End file.
